Mary Ellen Bates gets obsessed with how info pros can add value

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One of the many ideas for which Stewart Brand is rightfully known is his quote from 1987, presciently describing the current challenge of information professionals:

"Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine - too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better."

This blog looks at how we can make information immeasurably valuable to the recipient.

I am on the board of a local non-profit (the Boulder Center for Conscious Community).
The board includes a shaman, a Presbyterian minister, several therapists, an
office organizer and me – a mixed group if there ever was one. As the
treasurer, it’s my job to update the board every month on how we’re doing,
whether we’re meeting our goals, and so on.

For our mid-year budget review, I designed a beautiful
spreadsheet, with columns and rows highlighting our strengths and challenges,
and proudly sent it out to the rest of the board. Their reaction, to put it
mildly, was not positive. While a spreadsheet is a thing of beauty in my eyes,
I learned that many people find the following to be too information-dense:

So I took their feedback and created tables that addressed
the concerns of each board member. For the person responsible for renting
space, I sent data on our rentals over the last month. The membership committee
saw a report on number of members and additional donations from our community.
In other words, I created separate deliverables that were relevant to each
individual’s concerns. The following are pages that I sent to the person responsible
for renting space for events.

Month

Goal

Actual

Jan-April

$3,725

$4,119

May

$1,750

$1,196

June

$2,000

$750

July

$2,000

$1,009

August

$2,000

$2,580

September

$2,000

October

$2,000

November

$2,000

December

$2,000

And they loved
these reports; they saw what the numbers meant in terms of their
responsibilities. The lesson I learned is that people need white space and just
the data points that are relevant to them.

09/17/2012

Part of being a value-added info pro is learning to see ourselves as strategic resources within our organization or for our clients. That means taking responsibility for how our messages are being received and how we are preceived.

I use the elevator speech as one tool to help info pros describe their value succinctly. Instead of talking about what you do, focus on what happens afterward. What decision was made? What new initiative got off the ground?

An effective elevator speech grabs the listener's attention within the first five seconds and inspires the other person to implore you to tell them more. Like haiku or Twitter, it's an exercise in distilling the essence of an idea into as few words as possible.

08/03/2012

02/14/2012

Peter Warren, the creator of OpenHeatMap and writer at O'Reilly Radar, just wrote a nice post on how to create a data visualization. I really appreciate that he is able to write linearly about what always feels to me like a somewhat random process. I find myself looking at a spreadsheet, for example, and going zen... What's interesting here? What does this tell me? What wasn't I expecting?

Warren's steps to data viz creation are:

Play with your data -- explore what information is available and get a feeling for what stories it can tell.

Pick a question -- what will I be doing? Chose the exact title you want to give your visualization.

Sketch out your presentation -- figuring out how to show the information in a visual form. (Granted, this feels to me like "and here the magic happens".)

Crunch the data -- make sure your queries are effective, and that you can turn the raw information into a form that can be displayed meaningfully.

Build an interface -- enable interactivity between the data and users. Let other people to have as much fun exploring the data as you had.

Find the surprises -- Take the time to sit and play with the results. Little details are the stories that catch people's imagination and cause them to spread the word about your visualization.

01/11/2012

Over the years, several clients have asked me to provide a customized information monitoring service for them, where I keep my eye out for information that is of strategic value for them, but which they don’t have time to monitor themselves.

Basically, I ask them:

• What information resources are they already monitoring? (so I don’t duplicate their own knowledge)• What topics / trends / emerging opportunities / competitors they’d like me to monitor• What they see as their company’s threats and opportunities (so I can determine if there’s anything else that would be important to track)• How often they’d like to be updated• In what format they’d like to be updated

I then set up a monitoring profile for them that includes leading blogs, print and online publications, conference proceedings, research reports, government reports, etc. I usually call this an Executive Information Service.

I don’t actually market this as a service I offer, but I do send cool, “outside the box” articles to my clients about once a quarter just to stay on their radar. Inevitably one of them will say “this article is right on target for an issue we were dealing with. Do you think you could track some information for us on a regular basis?”

What it looks like and what I charge to do this depends on a number of variables: how many topics I’m monitoring, how many resources I’m checking, and how the results are formatted. (In other words, am I compiling links to key docs with a single-sentence indicator of relevance/value, or am I provided paragraph-length summaries of key points of each item I’ve included?)

I tend to work with a relatively small number of clients with whom I can build ongoing, broad-based working relationships. Since it's only a few clients, I'm not overly concerned about how this would scale. And I price the service high enough that only clients who really want it (and can afford it) ask for it. This is another way of keeping it scalable.

[N.B. While Kim Dority is an independent consultant, this is a service any info pro can provide within an organization! The value is in spending professional time and focus on a service that is limited to the highest-impact executives.]

01/03/2012

Political junky that I am, I'm watching the US presidential election obsessively closely. One thing I am interested in are the differences in policy among the candidates. And while there's nothing like curling up in front of the fire with a good 15-point analysis of energy policies, sometimes it helps to take a different, non-linear view.

One way to do that is to generate a word cloud -- a visual depiction of the most frequently occurring words in a body of text. As an example, here are the word clouds of the energy policy statements of Pres. Obama and candidates Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich (excluding the word energy itself). Note the differences in the most common words of the three. These may not be flashy, but they're certainly easier to grasp.

12/28/2011

Imagine you're looking for the buzz on a specific topic - for example, a client of mine wanted to know about how the word greenwashing was seen by the public, in order to assess its use in a fundraising campaign.

One of the approaches I took to answer her question was to count the number of articles that have the word greenwashing in them, by year. I decided to test this on two different databases -- Factiva.com and Google News Archive. I searched for the word and then limited my search by year, counted the number of articles retrieved, and put that information in an Excel spreadsheet.

Using Excel's graphing feature, I created a simple line graph showing that -- in the US business press, at least -- the use of the word greenwashing peaked 2009. Obviously, there's more to this story; this is just one way of creating insight from something as simple as search result counts.